Grace Face

Grace is getting to a really fun stage. She is really starting to pick up on copying people and things. Here is a little update in what she has been doing over the past few weeks. She has really started to mimic sounds of words. She says "Brre" for bread. She still says " Mo" for more. She says "Bbb" for banana. She says "Laa" for light. She just started to wave hi and clap. She is so so close to crawling but still can't connect the whole pushing off with her knees or legs. She is starting to love on stuffed animals more. She is always hungry and would eat all day if we let her. She still finds Vi hilarious. She is so loud. She loves to hear herself scream and is getting very fidgety in church. She is laughing a lot more these days and her laugh always sounds like she is gasping for air. It's pretty cute. We dropped her 3rd nap. She goes to bed around 7:30 at night at wakes up around 6:45-7:00. She has started jumping like a maniac in her exersaucer. We are thinking we should get one of those johnny jumper swings for her. She loves to grab at your face. Her hands will come out of nowhere and she will just attack you. I have a bunch of little scratches on my face constantly. She is dealing with the winter weather pretty well. We are looking forward to days we can be outside again. Overall Grace is doing great and days with her and Vi are good. I will be doing a big Violet update soon. 

Christmas in Utah

This Christmas break was so much fun. We got to be in Utah for a whole month. We did so many things over those couple weeks. I'll try to remember it all. We made gingerbread houses with all the cousins. Violet was loving it. She was pretty much in aw that there were bowls of candy everywhere and that she was allowed to put it all over a house and eat it. She had a lot of fun. My mom also did sugar cookies with the kids and let them decorate them with sprinkles galore. Vi seriously dumped every sprinkle she could find right on top of her cookies. So hers just ended up being massive mounds of sprinkles on a little bit of frosting. After cookies we went out to the lights in Kerns. They were so awesome and fun. They had thousands of lights timed to music and you drove through tunnels. The kids loved it.

Violet has been in absolute heaven with her cousin Jayne. They play princesses and dress ups all day. They have gotten to be the perfect little age for playing together. They got to have a dessert night together at Dear Lizzie. They wore dress ups together and got to pick a treat. While we were all sitting chatting the girls came over and told us they wanted to go on an adventure.  I just watched them from a distance. They were dancing around the store and pretending it was a fancy castle. I just love them together and their sweet imaginations. 

We spent a lot of time up at the cabin. Utah got dumped with so much snow while we were here. There was waist deep snow everywhere. The cabin was such a nice retreat. We played lots of games ( say anything lead to some awesome answers from Jayne and Max. We even got dad to play). We learned a bunch of new games  We had yummy food and lots of fun in the snow. Mike and I dug lots of tunnels through the snow and made a sledding run for the kids. We watched movies and lots of people read and took naps. 

Vi got pretty sick while we were up there. She threw up the day after Christmas and had diarrhea too. Then she got a bad cough and had serious growing pains. It was a lot going on for a sweet little girl. Gracie got it too. It was the only time she had ever just laid on me and snuggled for hours. It was heart breaking. Luckily the got over it after about a week. I felt so bad for them. I ended up staying with the girls a few times while Mike went and did things with his family. We just felt so bad dragging them around when they were feeling so lousy.

Dave and his family came up after Christmas. We were able to meet up with them for happy noon year and Provo Beach Resort and grab lunch in the River woods. We went to Grandma Reid's house and got to visit with her for awhile. Dave and Mike went snowboarding for a day up at Brighton. We also went out to Greg and Sherril's house a few times. We got to do our own Reid Christmas celebration with everyone at Annalee's house. We did white elephant and ate yummy food.

Christmas day was so great. Vi was super excited and loved her gifts. She played the whole rest of the day with all the toys that her and her cousins got.  Violet only asked for a girl donkey for christmas. She had gotten a stuffed animal donkey let year and I guess she felt like she needed a girl one with a skirt. The only problem was that the donkey we had gotten her before was all sold out. So we tried to play it off and got her a hippo and I made a skirt for it.  She didn't seem to mind. We made a really yummy big breakfast and lounged in our jammies the whole day.

On New Years Eve we went to Hans and Traci's house for a fun birthday party for Grandma Magleby. They had fun poppers and burned their Christmas tree out in the street. Vi loved playing with their dog Eddy and running around with cousins. 

Mike and I got to see Star Wars and Hunger Games while we were out here. It is so nice to get some date nights in. Steve and Dayna were super nice to make some treks out to Alpine at night so we could play games and hang out. 

Our friends Bree and Cory came over for a Sunday dinner, and it was so fun to get to see them and hang out. I miss getting to spend time with them and it was so fun to see all the kiddos together hanging out.

It has been such a wonderful trip and we are just so happy we got to spend the holidays with so many friends and family.

Grace at 9 Months Old

We have been in Utah now for a month over Christmas break. So I never got the chance to do an 8 month update on Grace. I will just combine the 2 since I only have pictures of her at 9 months. Grace is a sweetie. She has such a loving personality. Since we came to Utah she has been a little bit more clingy to me. She has done really well going to other people and gets over me not holding her in about 10 seconds, but she has started really reaching for me and saying mama. She also loves to bite and chew on my chin. It is pretty weird, but she loves it and tried to get it all the time.

She is a great sleeper at night. She does 11 hours and still takes 3 naps during the day. At least one of her naps ends up being a bit more of a cat nap, so we will be dropping it soon.She had a rough time for about a week of our vacation, because she got sick. When we go to put Grace down, I turn on her white noise and sing to her a little. She knows that is her cue and she will rest her head down on my shoulder and snuggle me. It is one of my favorite things that she does.She has gotten much better at transferring from the car to her crib, when she falls asleep on the go. She still wakes up pretty early, so we are trying to push her bed time back a little. Right now she gets up at 6:30 and I'm hoping that going to back to eastern time will give us a chance to switch things a bit.

Grace is a bit more of a mama's girl than Vi was. Vi pretty much always preferred Mike over me. Grace seems to want me more or starts fussing for me to pick her up if I am in the room. She hasn't crawled yet. She leans really far forward and reaches for things and can scoot a little bit. She has her legs close to going on her knees. She still hasn't figured out how to put it all together. I am okay with it. I love my babies stationary as long as possible. 

Grace loves to feed herself. She will shovel food in and loves to pick it up. She has gotten really good at it over the past few weeks. She is still good about eating baby food, but you can tell she prefers to pick up pieces. Lots of times she spits her food at us. It seems like she does it to be funny, but she is so messy. She has gotten so good at communicating with us about food. We taught her the same little things we taught Vi. She picked up on it quickly and now it makes it so much easier to know when she is hungry. When she wants food in general she says "mmmmm". When she wants more food she says "mo". She loves to drink water from a sippy cup and is really good at picking it up and tipping it back to drink all by herself. She will do "mmmm" and "mo" when she sees anyone drinking. 

She has just started bobbing her head when she hears music. She likes to do this funny fake laugh when anyone fake laughs at her. She will copy us and say " mama and dada", but only on her terms. She does not like to perform. I have mentioned before, but she is a tough one to get to laugh. She loves to give a good blank stare at you. It's pretty funny. We have discovered that she is ticklish. For a long time we couldn't get anything out of her, but she is an easy target now. 

She likes to sit and play with toys. She loves for you to sit and pass a ball to her. She will chew on everything. It could be teething, but since she was about a month old she has liked to just chew on anything we give her. She has 2 cute little teeth on the bottom. 

Grace is a great baby. She loves to go for rides in the car and get out of the house. She shows some interest in Baby Einstein. She gets comments from people about her eyes almost everyday. They are so big and blue that they really stand out. She can do the how big is Gracie trick. She starts to giggle as soon as you start saying it. She also loves peek a boo. Violet is still number one in her book. That girl can get Grace to smile pretty much instantaneously. Like I said before that is not an easy feat. She loves the water and bath time. I am glad because I thought she might not take to it as well as Vi did. Now she just really loves it. 

We have been blessed to have this sweet bug in our lives. She brings us so much joy.